STORY: THE SONG PROJECT TAKING SHAPE
Florrie came to me filled to overflowing with excitement about the idea of commissioning a song for her stepdaughter Virginia's wedding. Florrie had just received my Song-of-the-Month on the song "Bright Eyes"  (a father in the late stages of Lou Gehrig's Disease leaving a message for his daughter).  She was particularly moved by this song because her own husband suffers from a similar disease. We conducted a fruitful song interview, and I was on my way. But WAIT!! Florrie's level of enthusiasm about the song was so great that she wrote me the next morning to tell me that she had started hearing lyrics in a dream. She promptly typed them up and emailed them to me--careful to say "Please feel free to ignore these."

A SONG FOR A TRIBE IN GHANA!
So how DOES a song for a tribe in Ghana Africa come to be, exactly? In this case, Diane visited my website and wrote a one-line email: “I’M SOLD!”  and with that we were on our way. Diane discovered the small Village of Trom while she was in Ghana working on a project with Bentley College and HUGS International to build a school in a remote village. She noticed young children regularly walking into the village to gather water, and soon learned that they were walking an hour each day to deliver water to their even more remote village, called Trom. Their tribe consisted mainly of children orphaned by AIDS and their surviving grandparents, most of whom suffered from River Blindness (due to infested water).  Diane arranged for a visit to the Village of Trom (no small feat) and there she met and fell in love with the villagers. She then decided to spearhead a personal project in which she and her siblings would donate all the resources required to dig a fresh water well right in the village of Trom. (Diane grew up on a farm in Utah where a well was the centerpiece, and upon the very recent death of her father, felt compelled to coordinate with her siblings an honorary “McKinny Well” for this small, struggling tribe of lovely, buoyant children and elders.) As Diane began working on her project, the idea of a song, to be written for and sung at the dedication, came into her head, and she reached out to me. The project took on some surprising new turns from there!

TOPIC: ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and LOVE
A Father With ALS Offers Up a Song to Leave Behind for his Daughter

A SONG WIH A LIFE OF ITS OWN

WOW! This month's featured commission is one of those rare and wonderful stories where a song takes on a vector and velocity that far exceeds anything I could have wished or imagined for it! The heart of this story is Andy and his daughter Rachel. But the fireworks around the song are really quite incredible! To wit: as I write this, I am days away from performing this song, in a private concert, for the entire Board of Directors of The ALS Association. And I am just two weeks away from being flown to Washington DC (being put up at the Plaza!) to perform this song before a crowd of upwards of a thousand people at the ALS Association's National Public Policy Conference. The evening's agenda? Two US Senators receiving awards and...little old ME!  But the heart of this story is not about private concerts or Boards of Directors or Senators or crowds of thousands. The heart of this story is Andy, and ALS, a strikingly debilitating disease, and Rachel, Andy's teenaged daughter, and love. Love is definitely the star of the show. Read on to learn just how much heart there is in this story. And see to what far and fantastic corners, when it is deep and real, love can reach.

(Brace yourself--this write-up is an extensive one, whch perhaps underscores how much this experience has touched me.)

TOPIC: WELCOME NEW BABY!

THE STORY
Sandy came to me wanting a song that would serve as both a lullaby and a welcoming greeting to her new grandson Jonah. There were two unique challenges in creating this song: (1) Sandy (humbly, I think) requested that the song be from her but not use the word “I” (pretty much all of my songs, you might note, are written in the First Person because I believe that gives them the most intimacy—so this was new territory for me). And (2) this song was to acknowledge the fact that Sandy’s husband Lew had passed away and would not be present to greet Jonah, but this was to be done in such a way that this fact would not be overly obvious nor made an “issue” of in the song. 

Many of you may remember this story because it was so unusual and incredible: a father dying of Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS) who could no longer speak, commissioned a song for his young daughter. The CEO of the ALS Associoation heard the song and had me perform it live for his Board of Directors and then flew me to Washington DC to perform it for the larget-ever gathering of ALS pateints and their families. 

Two years later, the girl for whom this song was commissioned, now a teenager, has comissioned a response song for her father. He is now completely immobile and kept alive by respirator. Her song, and her fahter's original song to her, are both here in music-video format, and below that you can see me interviewed on TV about the intense journey I made with this family on these two songs.

TOPIC: The Love of a Pet, The Loss of a Pet And a New Understanding of Love

Last weekend I was invited to perform a song in a church...
...and I had an experience that felt so rare, so unexpected, and so connective, that I want to try to put words to it here, and share it with you.

The song is called  "Once Upon a Dog," and I performed it live at the First Parish UU Church in Concord, MA, as part of a weekend-long event there around "Reverence for Life."

AUTHOR'S NOTES, 5/17/17 INSERT
Note 1: This song, "From the Inside," is "Part 1" and relates to a follow-up song about the wonder of more fully experiencing the world around you, even--or perhaps especially--in a time of challenge (a cancer journey): "The Days of Your Opening."

Note 2: In December of 2016, sadly, Marie Pechet passed on. At her request, I performed this song as a centerpiece performance at her funeral. I had never performed it live before. It had been composed, at her request, nearly a decade earlier, when doctors had given her only a year or so to live. She outlived all prognoses and expectations, was a featured panel guest on NPR's series' about Living Exuberantly with Cancer, and began a blog that became increasingly popular over the course of her lifetime called "Adventures in Spiritual Living."  She will be missed. 

LEARNING HOW NOT TO "BE" WITH CANCER
Marie called me out of the blue one day a few months ago asking me to write a song to help her navigate her overwhelming experience with cancer. The story she told me was very inspirational. This was Marie's second experience with the disease, and this time felt very, very different to her from the first time. She explained that several years ago, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. From the moment of diagnosis until it was all over, she was worried but still felt she would get through this, like it would just be a short visit to the land of cancer. She did not want to join support groups. She did not want to say the word "cancer." She wanted to get through it and return to life as it had been. And, that is what happened. Quick surgery, and no chemo required. But then, several years and two adopted children later, Marie and her husband found themselves with two young sons whose mother faced a core-shaking diagnosis: stage III colon cancer.

TOPIC: A closer look at two love songs

FOREVER LISTENING: THE STORY (1996)
I wrote this song ten years ago, when I was newly in love with the man who turned out to be THE man--my husband Jim. This was one of those great experiences when a song just sort of "appears," fully formed. I was at a unique turning point in my life--I had left a painful marriage and a powerhouse Chicago advertising career in  the dust, and I was a 30-year-old, living back at my parents' house, licking my wounds, regrouping, working as a cashier in a little retreat of a store that sold incense and candles and spiritual books, and, all of a sudden, I was falling in love. (love!)  (LOVE!!!!) This song showed up in my head and it was sort of fighting its way past the piped-in music in the store so I kept on making up excuses to step outside with a pencil and a crumpled store recipt, scribbling down the words as they seemed to fall from the sky.  This song was like a marvel to me. I felt like I was almost "channelling" something, and that has been the feeling that has kept me creating songs for all the years since. This song is the most-requested song when I do live converts. It has been performed at weddings, played in birthing rooms, and every so often I get an email from someone who heard it at a spiritual retreat and wants to know more. It's definitely a song from one lover to another but I was astonished to discover when my son was born that it worked as a love song from a parent to a baby, too. And the folks who use it on spiritual retreats assure me the lyrics can fit for one's relationship with The Divine as well. Ah! The joy of tapping into a unversal truth!

TOPIC: Bride's sister toasts groom

Ten years ago, I wrote and recorded my first-ever commissioned song. It was for a wedding. I did so not because I was planning on writing a commissioned song. Back then, I'm not even sure I knew what a commissioned song was. But I'm getting ahead of myself. And this month (--less writing!--) I can let the TV tell you. Because not too long ago, I was the featured guest on yet another TV show, where I was asked how all this commissioned songwriting stuff got started. So here is that story: